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Authority and Innovation in Language Variation: Teenagers’ Perceptions of Variation in Spoken Irish

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Authority and Innovation in Language Variation: Teenagers’ Perceptions of Variation in Spoken Irish Authority and innovation in language variation: Teenagers’ perceptions of variation in spoken Irish Noel Ó Murchadha University of Limerick, Ireland THE THREE CATEGORIES OF CONTEMPORARY SPOKEN IRISH The 77,000 daily speakers of Irish reported in the 2011 Census are dispersed throughout Ireland (Central Statistics Office 2012: 40–42). This figure excludes Northern Ireland, for which figures are gathered by productive and passive lan- guage skills rather than frequency of usage. Less than one third of the daily speakers of Irish reside in areas officially designated by the state as Gaeltacht areas (see map in Ó hIfearnáin and Ó Murchadha 2011: 98), where Irish is one of the community languages. Significantly, most speakers now live in the post- Gaeltacht where English is the main vernacular of the community. Considerable linguistic variation exists within what McCubbin (2011: 461) calls the ethnocul- ture of habitual Irish-speakers. For members of this group, speaking Irish is fun- damental to their negotiation and management of identity in late modern society, rather than serving the merely symbolic function the language serves for the ma- jority of the Irish population (Mac Gréil and Rattigan 2009: 86; Watson 2008: 71). The variation within this group of habitual Irish-speakers involves not only the regional differences in the traditional speech of the Gaeltacht areas, but also the wide variation that is evident among younger speakers in the Gaeltacht, as well as the emergence and proliferation of alternative spoken norms within the post-Gaeltacht1 revivalist speech community. The variation in contemporary spoken Irish is described on a continuum from conservative local speech varie- 1 The term ‘post-Gaeltacht’ is used here to denote areas on the island of Ireland outside the official Gaeltacht areas identified by the state for the specific purpose of language planning. Irish was historically spoken as the dominant community vernacular in these areas, however, English now dominates following an historic lan- guage shift from Irish to English as main vernacular. This term encompasses areas which were, for a time, in- cluded in the Gaeltacht but that since been excluded, as well as areas that were never officially recognised by the state as Gaeltacht areas. ties firmly linked to specific Gaeltacht areas, to newly emergent supra-regional speech associated with post-Gaeltacht speakers and with Irish-medium educa- tion outside the Gaeltacht (Ó hIfearnáin and Ó Murchadha 2011: 102; Ó Mur- chadha 2011: 227). Some of the characteristic linguistic features of traditional Gaeltacht speech, Gaeltacht youth speech and post-Gaeltacht speech are ex- pounded in this contribution because they make up the linguistic backdrop to the experimental investigations into young people’s perceptions and evaluations of Irish varieties that are presented later in the chapter. Established hierarchical perceptions of each of the above varieties are presented and these perceptions are subsequently questioned in light of data collected in the Gaeltacht areas of the southern province of Munster. Participants’ subjective responses to stimulus voices in a speaker evaluation experiment indicate that although traditional Gaeltacht varieties are readily iden- tified as target spoken varieties by the participating teenaged cohort in openly- offered evaluations, Gaeltacht youth speech and post-Gaeltacht speech are both upgraded in in actual evaluations of speech varieties. Therefore, in the indexical order for spoken Irish, non-traditional varieties that ‘deviate’ from traditional Gaeltacht models are more closely linked with desirable personality traits than are the overtly acknowledged target models for language excellence. The more favourable responses to Gaeltacht youth speech and to post-Gaeltacht speech, in particular, are consistent with the well documented shift away from the tradi- tional speech of the Gaeltacht in terms of language change in formal features of spoken Irish overall. These linguistic changes are therefore supported in partici- pants’ subjective responses to the varieties of Irish with which they were pre- sented. The results suggest an intimate link between language change and socio- psychological factors and indicate that the use of experimental methods will be central in elucidating this link. TRADITIONAL GAELTACHT SPEECH It is believed that Irish was a relatively uniform language throughout the period of Old Irish from 600 to 900 AD and Middle Irish from 900 to 1200 AD (Breat- nach 1994: 227–228; Ó hUiginn 2008: 8), but regional variation became evident in spoken Irish from the twelfth century onwards and diversification continued throughout the period of Early Modern Irish, 1200 to c.1700 AD (Ó hUiginn 2008: 7; Ó Murchadha 2011; Williams 1994: 447–448). This is the period dur- ing which the highly prescriptive literary koine of Classical Irish flourished across Ireland and Scotland. Rigid adherence to this norm by many conservative writers in fact masks much of the variation which was coming to the fore at the time (Breatnach 1994: Ó hUiginn 2008: 7; Williams 1994: 447). However, evi- dence of this variation can be gleaned by looking at some manuscripts, particu- larly religious materials, which were written in accordance with spoken norms of the time (Williams 1994: 447). Essentially, the language forms found in these texts divide the language into the three main regional dialects of Irish found in present day Gaeltacht speech – Munster, Connacht and Ulster (Ó Dochartaigh 1992: 15). Traditional Gaeltacht speech is described as conservative local dialectal speech, showing little influence from English in phonology, syntax and vocabu- lary and is especially prevalent among speakers born before 1960 (Ó hIfearnáin and Ó Murchadha 2011: 102). While all of the traditional Gaeltacht dialects share a common core (Ó Murchú 1969; Ó Siadhail 1989), regional variation is a key feature of Gaeltacht speech so that we can speak of Munster Irish in the south, Connacht Irish in the west and Ulster Irish in the northwest, each in turn displaying some internal variation. Distinctions between regions are noted to different extents in phonology, lexical stress, lexical items, syntax, and intona- tion. We can consider some differences in the stress pattern and the pronuncia- tion of consonants and vowels as examples. The lexical stress pattern and stress shift are prominent features of regional variation (Ó Sé 1989: 149). The primary stress pattern in lexis for Modern Irish involves placing the primary stress on the first syllable (Ó Sé 1989: 148; Ó Si- adhail 1989: 26). There are, however, exceptions to this rule and, because these exceptions vary from region to region, the Gaeltacht speech of Munster, Con- nacht and Ulster are quite easily identifiable by their stress patterns. The stress pattern in Munster Irish has been described among its most striking characteris- tics (Ó Sé 2000). It involves the primary stress shifting to the second syllable of two-syllable words where the second vowel is long, and to the third syllable of three-syllable words where the third vowel is long and the preceding two are short (Ó Sé 2009: 1, 2000: 46–48; Ó Siadhail 1989: 29–30; Ua Súilleabháin 1994: 481). Lexical stress in Ulster Irish falls consistently on the first syllable and is closely linked to the length of vowels in unstressed syllables so that those vowels are shortened significantly (Hughes 1994: 625). Unstressed vowels are not shortened in this manner in Connacht. A “tendency towards forward stress”, perhaps under influence from Munster, has been detected in the case of Con- nacht, but it is argued that it was “too weak ever to gain much ground, and the natural preference for initial stressing inevitably reasserted itself” (Blankenhorn 1981: 241). The stress pattern thus distinguishes the regional varieties of Irish. As regards pronunciation, we can look at the vowel represented orthograph- ically by the letters <ao> which is produced as a long front vowel [i:] in Ulster and Connacht Irish, but as a long front vowel [e:] in Munster Irish. The render- ing of some consonants and clusters can likewise be used to distinguish between the dialect areas. In Munster, for instance, the word for ‘hill’ in Irish cnoc is likely to be produced as [knuk] and the word for ‘women’ mná as [mna:], while [kruk] and [mra:] are most likely to be produced in Ulster (Ó Siadhail 1989: 95). Both northern and southern forms are attested in the area of Conamara, in Con- nacht. The linguistic forms described here provide an insight into some of the characteristic linguistic features of Munster Irish in the south, Connacht Irish in the west and Ulster Irish in the north. These features provide some of the basis for the traditional distinction between the three main dialects of Irish in the Gaeltacht. GAELTACHT YOUTH SPEECH Gaeltacht youth speech, likewise, varies by area and maintains features of the traditional local varieties, including some of the most distinctly local features (Ó Murchadha 2011). Research in the Gaeltacht education system at all levels re- veals the presence of a diverse blend of linguistic backgrounds among pupils (Harris 2008; Hickey 2007, 2001; Mac Donnacha et al. 2005; Ó Giollagáin et al. 2007). The young Gaeltacht population has been described, referring to Dorian’s (1981: 189) classification, as consisting of good proficient speakers with accura- cy in local speech and mastery of the standard written variety, as well as speak- ers who have little Irish (Ó hIfearnáin 2006: 25). The Irish of young Gaeltacht speakers, however traditional their linguistic background, is now moving very rapidly away from the local variety (Ó hIfearnáin and Ó Murchadha 2011: 102). Regional features are becoming less marked (Ó Curnáin 2007; Ó Sé 2000) so that a levelled variety of spoken Irish is developing among younger speakers. The sociolinguistic profile of younger speakers and their linguistic competence in Irish and in English inevitably affects the choice of language for in-group communication (Hickey 2001: 461; Mac Donnacha et al.
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